bogus comments on The two insights of materialism - Less Wrong

18 Post author: Academian 24 March 2010 02:47PM

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Comment author: bogus 25 March 2010 04:21:10PM *  3 points [-]

ETA: Correct me if I'm wrong, but a materialist of the first kind would be one who is open to the possibility of p-zombies.

No, p-zombies are supposed to be indistinguishable from the real thing. You can tell apart a simulation of consciousness from an actual conscious being, because the simulation is running on a different substrate.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 25 March 2010 05:07:58PM *  4 points [-]

Basically, yes. But I think it's worthwhile to distinguish between physically (the original definition), functionally, and behaviorally identical p-zombies, where materialists reject the possibility of the first, and functionalists reject the first and second (each is obviously a superset of the former).

NB: "Functionally identical" is handwaving, absent some canonical method of figuring out what computation a physical system implements (the conscious-rocks argument).